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UnitedHealth to hire 300 for new Jax call center

A health care company is expanding on the First Coast and is likely to add about 300 jobs to the Jacksonville area by the end of the year.

UnitedHealth Group secured a lease in December to remodel an existing 47,000-square-foot building at 7159 Corkland Drive in Jacksonville. The renovation will eventually house a call center to handle issues with the company’s healthcare professional customers. The project is expected to cost OptumRx, the parent company, about $1.5 million according to a building permit filed in Jacksonville.

OptumRx spokesman David Himmel said construction on the call center should be completed by late spring and about 150 people will be employed in the initial opening. That number should climb to 300 employees by the end of the year.

“We’re expanding. The business is growing. UnitedHealth Group is bringing all of its UnitedHealth Care commercial memberships in house to be handled by its own pharmacy benefit management company. This is part of that expansion,” Himmel said Thursday during a phone interview from his office near OptumRx’s headquarters in Irvine, Calif.

The Jacksonville call center will be the first of its kind in Florida for the company, though there are also call centers recently opened or in development in California, Arizona, Kansas and Texas. UnitedHealth already has health insurance and health provider connections to Jacksonville.

Prior to establishing call centers, UnitedHealth hired outside services to handle calls but Himmel said the company’s been so successful, it’s part of the evolution to handle their own calls.

“We’ll just be doing general customer service calls. It will be from members. It will be from providers. It will be from physicians with questions about health care coverage and things like that,” Himmel said.

Himmel acknowledged the positions at the Jacksonville call center will be entry level and will offer salaries ranging from $27,000 to $30,000 per year. But people landing those jobs can also seek advancement within the company, he said.

OptumRx is wasting no time in hiring for the call center and the company gets moving from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday and Tuesday with a job fair at the Embassy Suites hotel, 9300 Baymeadows Road, Jacksonville.

Himmel said they’re looking to hire locally and anyone applying for positions at the call center will not get relocation costs paid for.